He believed defeat was ‘certain’ after a series of self-inflicted wounds, but Magnus Carlsen overcame self-doubt and a stubborn opponent to show the greatest champions find the path to victory when they’re not at their best

Magnus Carlsen survived the toughest test of his career to retain the world chess championship.
Photograph: Kena Betancur/AFP/Getty Images

Magnus Carlsen looked spent. It was Thursday morning in New York, less than a full day after he had survived the sternest test of his career to successfully defend the world chess championship on his 26th birthday. He’d celebrated into the night with dinner and a champagne shower at the BLT Prime steakhouse in Gramercy surrounded by family, sponsors and hangers-on. It was a catharsis hard-won.

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Now the task was accomplished, and he could finally offer a sober assessment of the three-week psychodrama which had nearly cost him everything. He spoke deliberately from a brown leather wraparound couch at the Ritz-Carlton in Battery Park, where sleep had come so sparingly during those interminable nights last week when the Norwegian champion, bruised by self-doubt after falling behind his Russian challenger Sergey Karjakin in the best-of-12-games match, accepted the reality that the title which represented his life’s work had “certainly” slipped from his grasp.

“I did not have a positive state of mind,” he recalled. “I felt that even though I still thought I was the strongest player that it would be very difficult to prove since after all I had only a couple of chances left to win games. At that point, part of me still believed in it.”

His voice trailed off.

“But it was very, very difficult.”

The greatest champions are defined not by winning when all the tumblers are aligned in their favor, but by how they persist and problem-solve and pull it from the bag when they’re not at their best. Serena Williams scratching out points at the net when her thunderbolt serve has betrayed her. A flu-stricken Michael Jordan, dehydrated and barely upright, willing the Chicago Bulls to victory in the NBA finals. The great ones don’t merely find a path to victory, they invent it. By that measure, Carlsen’s fightback from the brink will be remembered long after the chess itself has been forgotten.

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The queen sacrifice has been described as the beauty of chess incarnate, a tactical flourish that highlights the aesthetic potential of a game that’s increasingly – and never more than in the generation since Deep Blue v Kasparov, 1997 – become informed by the machinelike objectivity of the supercomputer. Sixty years ago, a gawky 13-year-old in blue jeans named Robert James Fischer used the willful concession of his strongest piece to defeat the leading American master Donald Byrne in the Rosenwald memorial tournament at the Marshall chess club in Greenwich Village. That game sparked a meteoric ascent that culminated with the Brooklyn prodigy’s epochal world championship win in 1972. Yet it was Fischer’s extraordinary victory over Byrne that’s come to be known as the game of the century. Style matters.

For nearly three weeks, the freewheeling adaptability that has been Carlsen’s calling card – the daring abandon of memorized opening lines in favor of chess-playing – had been stifled by a stubborn Russian challenger hellbent on transforming this year’s world championship match into attritional war. They had drawn all but two of the 12 games in regulation, forcing a tie-breaker consisting of four rapid games (in which each player starts with 25 minutes to complete his moves) on Wednesday afternoon in the sound-proof studio on the third floor of the Fulton Market Building at the South Street Seaport.

They’d drawn the first two with Carlsen missing a win in the second, but the Norwegian used his time better in both, and was never in danger of losing. Then in the third as Karjakin once again ran short on time, a blunder on the 37th move handed the Carlsen the crucial victory. Now the champion needed only a draw with the white pieces in the finale to win the title.

But Carlsen, who is also the world’s top-ranked rapid player, had no interest in backing into the championship. He took control of the center and forced Karjakin backward, tightening his grip on the position and choking off all points of escape. Then Carlsen offered to surrender his strongest piece to ensnare Karjakin’s king in a mating net, a coup de grâce all the more breathtaking given the faster time control of rapid play. “It was the kind of move every chess player dreams about getting a chance to make,” commentator Maurice Ashley told NRK, the Norwegian public broadcasting network which had aired the match in primetime. “That move will be remembered forever.”

The triumph capped a stunning reversal of fortune for the champion, who nine days earlier had found himself on the brink of a humiliation practically unthinkable at the outset of the three-week match. Carlsen had arrived in New York an overwhelming favorite against Karjakin, a relatively unheralded opponent who had earned his place at the board by winning the eight-man Candidates Tournament in March, which he entered as a 15-1 longshot. Straw polls among grandmasters unilaterally tipped Carlsen, who has been known as the ‘Mozart of chess’ since before he was a teenager, citing his rating and match experience.

The first seven games had been draws, with Karjakin managing spectacular escapes in the third and fourth that evoked comparisons to Soviet predecessors Botvinnik, Spassky and Karpov. On the other side, Carlsen’s frustrations became increasingly evident.

“When he managed to hold those positions early, maybe I should have been more focused on that in my preparation, to train for the fifth and sixth, even seventh hours of play,” Carlsen said on Thursday. “Because I felt that it was very clear that I was better than him in the second and third hours of play. A lot better. But then he started to defend and became difficult.”

The difficulty redoubled in the eighth game when Carlsen’s gamble for a win with the white pieces backfired. Time became a factor for both players and after more than five hours and 52 moves, Carlsen resigned. He declined television interviews in the immediate aftermath and then, frustrated by a delay before the mandatory post-match press conference, stormed from the stage. The incident made headlines from Pravda to Deadspin. (“I was just devastated, I couldn’t sit there,” he recalled. “It’s not my proudest moment.”)

This was the tactical equivalent of an outmatched side playing 11 men behind the ball with the hopes of sneaking one on the counter for a smash-and-grab victory. And it was working. Karjakin needed only hold for draws in five more games to complete a stunning upset. Mozart found himself at the tip of Salieri’s blade.

Everything Carlsen had worked for – the title he’s held for three years, the image of invincibility that he’s traded on for millions in endorsements and modeling side gigs – hung in the balance.

“In those moments the important thing is to focus on the process instead of the results, but it’s very, very hard,” he said. “Even a bit during the game, I was thinking how am I going to win this rather than trying to make the best move, which is not a very good strategy.

Karjakin played out his strategy in the ninth game, which ended in another lengthy draw, this one after 74 moves. Then came the fateful 10th on Thanksgiving Day, when Karjakin missed an early chance to force a draw by perpetual check that would have moved him one step closer to the prize. Carlsen then dug in for a six-and-a-half-hour grind, ultimately scratching out the result to set the stage for Wednesday’s white-knuckle finale.

Carlsen said on Thursday his focus now will be on controlling the emotions that nearly did him in. The Norwegian, who has famously declined to work with a sports psychologist, confirmed he plans on enlisting one moving forward.

“When everything is under control it’s very, very difficult to beat me,” he said. “But obviously my playing strength drops quite a bit when everything is not going according to plan. I think I’ll have to work on that more seriously in the future. It’s very easy when things are going my way. I’m going from victory in one tournament to another and the confidence is there. When it’s not there, things fall apart a bit.”

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Twelve months ago it would have strained credulity to imagine Karjakin even playing for the title, let alone pushing Carlsen to the limit. He was coming off a bad year that saw him fell from the top 10 in the world rankings, until he defeated a series of higher-ranked opponents in the Candidates Tournament to earn the title shot. He came to New York ranked No9 in the world and departs at No6.

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Karjakin offers Carlsen a fascinating foil. He was born in Crimea, where he ascended to the title of grandmaster when he was 12, still a world record. He felt his development was stunted in Ukraine and relocated to Russia in 2008, where he was granted citizenship by presidential decree. Perhaps not coincidentally, he’s voiced outspoken support of Vladimir Putin and the invasion of Crimea, ridiculing western sanctions against Russia. When the US supreme court ruled on gay marriage, Karjakin didn’t mince his words: “On this ‘landmark’ day for America, I rejoiced for the first time in my life that I’ve never been there.”

Political overtones have long stoked mainstream interest in chess, never more than the cold war proxy battle between Fischer and Spassky. An undercurrent of paranoia surfaced in the build-up to this year’s match when it was reported that Carlsen had enlisted Microsoft as a cybersecurity consultant, fearing Karjakin’s team was out to hack into their preparations or Skype conversations with his seconds.

But even more alluring is the idea that a sport’s peerless champion may have found a contemporary rival for years to come.

Even before he unseated Viswanathan Anand for the world title with clinical ease in Chennai three years ago, Carlsen, then 22, was already regarded as the world’s best player. The match was cast as a passing of the torch from Anand, who was 43, a relic of the pre-computer era when elite players came of age studying from books and notecards almost exclusively.

Karjakin was born in 1990, the same as Carlsen. Which means this year’s championship marked the first ever between players brought up entirely in the age of computer chess. The once-clunky machines that spit out nonsensical moves developed at an exponential rate. Now there are chess programs that could fit on an iPhone that could beat just about any human in the world. These machines engender in rising players a sort of objectivity that will make Karjakin a more difficult opponent for Carlsen than Anand, a former world champion.

Carlsen will now hold the title for two years before he’s required to defend it. Karjakin, as he alluded in Wednesday’s aftermath, will be there waiting. But he will rue how close he came here in Manhattan, while Carlsen can take heart in his taste for the fight.

“It’s good to know that I can win even if things don’t go my way, since what happened up until the 10th game basically was the worst-case scenario,” he said. “It’s been a fight throughout. It hasn’t been particularly pretty. Of course the finish was pretty, at least from my point of view, but it’s most of all been a fight. For me that’s what chess is about and what these matches should be.”